LINGUIST is pleased to announce the launch of an exciting new feature: Easy Abstracts! Easy Abs is a free abstract submission and review facility designed to help conference organizers and reviewers accept and process abstracts online. Just go to: http://www.linguistlist.org/confcustom, and begin your conference customization process today! With Easy Abstracts, submission and review will be as easy as 1-2-3!

The aim of the ALNLP 2010 workshop is to bring together researchers to foster innovation and discussion that advances our understanding of practical and theoretical issues for active learning in NLP. This workshop follows the ALNLP workshop held in Boulder, Colorado at NAACL 2009.

Ample recent work has demonstrated the effectiveness of active learning over a diverse range of applications. Despite these findings, active learning has not yet been widely adopted for many ongoing large-scale corpora annotation efforts -- resulting in a dearth of real-world case studies and copious research questions. Machine learning literature has primarily focused on active learning in the context of classification, devoting less attention to issues specific to NLP including annotation user studies, incorporation of semantic information, and more complex prediction tasks (e.g. parsing, machine translation).

Topics The aim of this workshop is to foster innovation and discussion that advances our understanding in these and other practical issues for active learning in NLP. Topics of particular interest include:

We also welcome case-study papers describing the application of active learning in real-world annotation projects and lessons learned thereby. Additionally, we would consider papers with insights applicable to NLP from other machine learning communities (e.g., computer vision, bioinformatics, and data mining), where annotation costs are also high.

Submissions We invite submissions of two kinds: 1. original and unpublished work as full papers, limited to 8 pages (+1 extra page for references); 2. position or work-in-progress papers, limited to 4 pages (including references). Both kinds of papers will appear in the proceedings and presented orally. As reviewing will be double-blind, author information should not be included in the papers and self-reference should be avoided.